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Comment by jmopp | Hacker News Reader

It's an interesting game-theory problem. If everyone locked down, the virus would have been contained. But global cooperation is pretty much impossible, and every choice had its cost.

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That is a false premise. First, even if all humans locked down for weeks that wouldn't have contained the virus due to the existence of animal reservoirs. Second, even with perfect global cooperation it's not even possible to lock everyone down. What about farmers, food distribution, healthcare, utilities, law enforcement, etc? Those people are going to carry and spread the virus. The notion of containing a highly contagious respiratory virus was just stupid and unrealistic from the start.

If I remember correctly, the stated goal was not to eliminate Covid, but to “flatten the curve” to prevent hospitals from getting overwhelmed

[Speaking from a UK perspective, YMMV in other countries] Originally it was, yes, yet this shortly got brushed under the carpet, and we were repeatedly told "just two more weeks!" with the apparent goal of solving death. Society only opened back up because ordinary people got sick of it. If we'd carried on "listening to experts" we'd have been lucky to have last Christmas with more than 6 people round the table

The goalposts really went supersonic once vaccines came onto the table. Allegedly, they were supposed to be our ticket out of hell, but clearly the enthusiasts were enjoying it too much to allow that. From "just wait this lockdown out until we have a vaccine" to "until all over 40s have been jabbed" to people still insisting that "it's not safe until we've triple jabbed 18 year olds", as we opened up and their apocalyptic fantasies did not come to fruition

What it would have done was taken the reproduction number below 1, making contact tracing effective. It's the distinction between 'elimination' and 'eradication'. TB is a classic example of a highly contagious respiratory disease that has been eliminated from much of the developed world. Yes, active TB cases still pop up, but the spread is stopped before it goes out of hand. The fact that associations like the NBA managed to implement a successful bubble shows it would have been possible for essential services to keep moving. Yes, the cost of doing so would have been high, but if people in February 2020 knew what was coming they might have considered it more seriously.

> What it would have done was taken the reproduction number below 1, making contact tracing effective.

This assumes that most people in the society are not very privacy-conscious, i.e. are fine with being tracked (contact tracing).

Nonsense. Contact tracing failed everywhere it was tried. And any measures were temporary at best. You can't eliminate a highly contagious disease with multiple animal reservoirs. The virus was always destined to run through the entire human population regardless of what we did. Any belief otherwise is pure hubris.

And personally I'm certainly not willing to participate in any scheme involving the government tracking my location.

locking everything down is impossible because ppl would start to starve within a week or so. specialisation and compartmentalisation of labor has a price

For a lockdown to be effective, it didn't need to shut down the city completely. Just do enough to get R0 (the avg number of people who each person infects) below 1. This causes the case numbers to drop exponentially. And when case numbers are small enough, contact tracing can be used.

You assume that lockdowns actually work. We have three years of evidence to suggest otherwise. And if that isn’t enough there is this gem of a study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2130424/

Turns out that even after seventeen weeks of complete isolation in Antarctica you can still catch the common cold…

So yeah… you can’t stop Mother Nature no matter how hard you try.

Do we? Case numbers in Melbourne seemed to go down a few weeks after we went into hard lockdown, each and every time we did it.

It could have been a coincidence each time, but I’d need some good studies to convince me.

It was a coincidence each time. The problem is that epidemic waves last a certain amount of time, and politicians tend to enact lockdown after a certain amount of delay because they want to be sure it's really going up and have to wait a few days for the announcements to propagate etc, and then you have to wait a short period before you expect any impact anyway. And then that's when the epidemic naturally goes into decline.

It's trivial to prove this because waves last roughly the same amount of time everywhere, so you can just compare places that went into lockdown with places that didn't and see what happens. The answer is that the waves are the same size and shape regardless of what governments do.

You can also do a regression analysis on "strictness indexes" and case counts, which also yields no correlation. There are such studies:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.6043...

"Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate"

https://thefatemperor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/1.-LANC...

"Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and wide-spread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people"

But you don't need studies. The fact that Sweden didn't lock down and yet has some of the lowest COVID mortality in Europe is decisive. Claims about the effects and necessity of lockdowns were universal and made no exception for Sweden, so the existence of even a single counter-example disproves the theories.

afaik swedes did the lockdown more or less voluntarily.

dunno how much that is true or played into it thou

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